Greek crisis reveals a 'brutal Germany'

Harsh tone puts reputation at risk over bailout plan

By Steven Erlanger, New York Times

Published
10:33 pm EDT, Friday, July 17, 2015

London

For decades, Germany saw its role as the financier and beneficiary of European unity, a combination of penance for the past and self-interest. The rest of the continent came to rely on it as the country that could be trusted to keep its great experiment moving forward.

But with its handling of Greece's bailout package, Germany is at risk of losing that trust, some European analysts say. By taking what sounded to many as an aggressive, punishing, contemptuous tone toward Greece, the German leadership may have undercut its moral authority, they say. And by floating the notion that Greece might be better off leaving the common currency, Germany displayed its national interest more nakedly than in the past and made it clear there are limits to its willingness to put European unity first.

The German Parliament assented on Friday, with a bit of grumbling, to negotiations on another large bailout for Greece. But Chancellor Angela Merkel and her finance minister, Wolfgang Schaeuble, have appeared as unenthusiastic about the deal as the Greeks.

Schaeuble, after helping to negotiate a deal expressly intended to keep Greece in the eurozone, has suggested several times that Greece would be better off leaving. In Greece, he is portrayed as a Nazi. Even an Italian weekly, L'Espresso, showed him on its cover with the headline: "This man scares us, too."

For many in Europe, especially on the center left, the Greek crisis "revealed a more brutal Germany, embodied in Schaeuble," said Hans Kundnani, the author of "The Paradox of German Power."

"But we see, with this crisis, a qualitative transformation of the European Union into a more coercive bloc, different from the one the founding fathers had in mind or even the creators of the single currency," he said. "And Germany is at the heart of that."